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Puzzling origin of 'Philadelphia lawyer'

By Jim Willard

Posted:
10/18/2012 08:50:07 PM MDT

Occasionally after a fierce tennis practice -- some players actually perspire -- the topics of conversation fly around like leaves in a summer wind. Such was the case recently as the subject of lawyers and particularly "Philadelphia lawyers" came to the fore.

Legend has it that in 1733 a New York printer named John Peter Zenger published in his newspaper, the "New York Weekly Journal," published attacks on the administration of the governor of the colony, William Cosby (not a progenitor of the comedian).

Cosby did not think this was funny and he had Zenger arrested on a charge of libel. John Peter was held in jail for a number of months awaiting trial.

His friends got busy and contacted the former Attorney General of Philadelphia, Andrew Hamilton, to handle the case. At the trial, Hamilton freely admitted that his client had published the statements held in question by the prosecution. However, he maintained that since the statements were true no libel had been committed.

The jury supported that contention and Zenger walked.

The verdict substantiated the basis for the freedom of the press in America.

Supposedly then, people began to say "It took a Philadelphia lawyer to get Zenger out."

It's a good story, but no records note it.

The first recorded use of "Philadelphia lawyer" occurred in 1788, in the form of "It would puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer." That was in "The Columbian Magazine" of Philadelphia in a letter written from a man in London to a correspondent in Philadelphia.

Another parallel saying came out of New England as "any three Philadelphia lawyers are a match for the devil." Although, some of my doctor friends claim that the devil has a large collection of lawyers at his disposal.

There is a certain amount of logic supporting the fact that lawyers from Philadelphia would be sharp. At that time, the city was the intellectual and literary center of America and clever lawyers would be in abundance.

However, when wits become finely honed they sometimes drift into the dark side of the unscrupulous, so what was once praise turned to satire as some lawyers began to seem less honorable.

In today's slanguage, the term is more likely to describe an attorney whose dealings are somewhat questionable.

In case you were curious, the American Ostrich Association has about 3,800 members.

It was a good decade for scorpions, not so good for people. In the 1940s, 20,352 people were killed by scorpions in Mexico.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of "fifteen men on a dead man's chest" in a song his pirates sang in "Treasure Island." He liked the sound of it, so he borrowed the "Dead Man's Chest" from Charles Kingsley who used the phrase as the name of one of the Virgin Islands in his novel "At Last," which was published in 1871, 10 years before "Treasure Island."

The coast of Norway is punctuated with so many fjords that its total length is about 21,350 kilometers, roughly one half the circumference of the planet.

Quick trick question: How many Olympic medals did MGM bathing beauty and box office queen Esther Williams win? Answer: None; she qualified for three events in the 1940 Olympics only to have them and the 1944 edition canceled by World War II.

Jim Willard, a Loveland resident since 1967, retired from Hewlett-Packard after 33 years to focus on less trivial things. He calls Twoey, his bichon frisé-Maltese dog, vice president of research for his column.

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